Globalization necessitates an audience of diverse languages and geographic locations. To satisfy a user's information need, relevance is necessarily a function of both language and location.
Consider a company whose potential clients are in different countries and regions, speaking difference languages. The company's web site contains pages that are relevant for different clients. For example, one page aims at potential English-speaking clients from Los Angeles (“our sales office is a short distance from the Union Station. . . .”); another page aims at potential clients from Los Angeles speaking Spanish; still another page at clients from Los Angeles speaking Chinese; and still another page at clients from Shanghai speaking Chinese (a Chinese equivalent of the following message “Our Shanghai office handles businesses throughout the Eastern China”).
Now suppose all these web pages are searchable through a search engine.
A user query submitted to the search engine might originate from any part of the world, and the user composes the query in a language of her choice. If the search engine can automatically discern the origin, and the language, of the query, then the engine can match information in the most appropriate combination of location and language, and display accordingly. For example, a barber shop's information is typically relevant only to a user from the same or neighboring zip codes, a CPA from the same or neighboring cities, and a software developer maybe the same country, all preferentially speaking the same language as a potential client.
In searching, the state of the art is to use information contained in user's browser and the user query to detect the country (in prior art FIG. 4, for example), or the geographic location (in prior art FIG. 5, for example), or the preferred language (in prior art FIG. 3, for example). There is also prior art that uses information provided by user's browser to determine both the country and the language (in prior art FIG. 2, for example).
The state of the art is not satisfactory. For one reason, geographic locations are of different “granularities” arranged in a hierarchical manner. It decidedly enhances relevance if the smallest possible granularity (many times much finer than “country”) is discerned, and used in searching. For example, the zip code 90024 corresponds to an area within the district of West Los Angeles, which in turn is within the city of Los Angeles, which in turn is part of the Greater Los Angeles, Southern California, California, America's West Coast, the United States of America, and North America. When the zip code 90024 is detected, search results associated with the zip code might be the most relevant, those associated with the district are less relevant, and in a decreasing order of relevance those associated with the city, the region, so on.
The state of the art is not satisfactory, for another reason, that sometimes there could be multiple detected locations. Further, sometimes there could be multiple detected languages. The state of the art uses only one pair of location and language, if that.
Further, the recent explosion of online videos for consumers, exemplified by contents on and visits to YouTube.com, leads to the contention that an explosion of online video for businesses is in the offing. Continuing the example above, suppose the company's web site features “About Us” videos that are dubbed in different languages aiming at different geographic locations. The need for a search engine to consider the best combinations of location and language is even more pronounced.
An observation from the example above is that many times a same piece of information exists in different languages for audiences in different locations, which calls for a means to identifying such relationships among records. Current state of the art does not speak to this.
The discussion above applies to records that comprise of Web pages, documents, catalogues, and advertisements.
This and all other extraneous materials discussed herein are incorporated by reference in their entirety. Where a definition or use of a term in an incorporated reference is inconsistent or contrary to the definition of that term provided herein, the definition of that term provider herein applies and the definition of that term in the reference does not apply.
What is still needed is methods that automatically discern geographic locations of the smallest possible granularity, determine the language or the languages of the user query, and evaluate the applicability of the geographic locations using at least the language or the languages. Once locations and languages are determined, best combinations of locations and language help retrieve and display records.